<strong>Sestri Levante, Italy, Perth, Australia and Boston &mdash; March 14 </strong><br />Giunti Labs is pleased to announce that its acquisition of the IPR, assets and contracts of the HarvestRoad Hive digital repository and of the technical content management system (TCMS), along with their installations worldwide is completed, and both the brand and IPR are now fully owned by Giunti Labs.<br /> <br />As a result, the HarvestRoad Hive product line will remain, to play an important part of Giunti Labs&rsquo; growing suite of solutions and services within the learning and technical content management space. As such, Giunti Labs has integrated HarvestRoad&rsquo;s skilled workforce into its newly established Giunti Labs&rsquo; Asia Pacific operations, based in Perth and Sydney, Australia. <br /> <br />This move will extend Giunti Labs&rsquo; global reach, complementing its branches in Europe (Florence, Milan, Rome, London, Lund and Frankfurt) and North America (Boston and Atlanta) as well as adding a valuable digital marketplace engine component to its world-leading digital content management suite offering.<br /><br />Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Labs, commented: &ldquo;Today, economic globalization and the resulting pressures on labor market competitiveness are providing new challenges for our educational systems. Employees, students and citizens are being asked to develop new skills and competencies in a fraction of time that has been the accepted norm, and at proficiency levels previously unknown.&rdquo;<br /> <br />&ldquo;The advent of 3G, mobile, location-based and broadband internet, together with the swift advance of social networking, is putting people all over the globe in touch as never before,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;This can provide unmatched benefits for our day-to-day working habits and learning conditions if governments, academia and industry start investing in new generation digital content marketplaces for the shared creation, harvesting and distribution of richer and more personalized learning resources.&rdquo;<br /> <br />&ldquo;Acquiring HarvestRoad&rsquo;s educational and technical content management technologies is a key step in our long-term drive towards excellence in learning and knowledge content production, as well as in its management and delivery value chain,&rdquo; continued Cardinali. &ldquo;HarvestRoad&rsquo;s Hive and TCMS technologies complement our flagship learning content management system (LCMS), learn eXact, which also offers innovative mobile, virtual and location based content authoring and rendering capability, with a scalable and reliable architecture for rich media caching and distribution within educational and technical documentation scenarios.&rdquo;<br /> <br />&ldquo;The integration of our offering is expected to begin immediately and will be based on open service oriented standards and architectures for education, such as MIT&rsquo;s OKI OSIDs, and IBM&rsquo;s SOA. This will enable seamless interoperability among the various optional components and smooth integration with any third-party standard virtual learning environment (VLE) and learning management system (LMS),&rdquo; Cardinali explained. <br /> <br />&ldquo;This will include flagship open source solutions such as Moodle and Sakai, with whom both learn eXact and HarvestRoad Hive repository technologies interoperate already using OKI OSID protocols.&rdquo; <br /> <br />Michael King, vice president of IBM Education Industry, commented:&rdquo; This acquisition brings together two leaders in learning technology, particularly addressing the need for educational institutions to create and deploy course content in a flexible, standards-based infrastructure. We see clients seeking to deploy more advanced content management and learning solutions to meet the requirements of 21st-century education, and the integrated solution from Giunti Labs, incorporating HarvestRoad Hive, provides a high-quality solution. &ldquo;IBM partnership with Giunti Labs and the integration of HarvestRoad Hive within IBM solutions means we will be able to assist our clients in implementing this solution in an open, flexible environment.&rdquo;<br /> <br />&ldquo;Given the worldwide coverage and renowned capability of both providers, this acquisition should turn into a win-win solution for the learning and content management arenas, by allowing publishers, producers, corporate and educational institutions to benefit from advances in, the production, management, discovery, interchange and reuse of new generation digital content for learning, knowledge, performance and business processes support,&rdquo; Cardinali concluded.<br /> <br />&ldquo;HarvestRoad and Giunti Labs solutions have both been well received by customers in North America that want to leverage and maximize the value of their digital assets,&rdquo; said Stephan Thieringer, COO of Giunti Labs North America. &ldquo;By combining the technologies, solutions and organizations of our two companies, our users in education, government, defense and corporate enterprises will benefit greatly.&rdquo;<br />